If you try to protect everything, you’ll succeed at defending nothing. We can’t defend everywhere all at once, so we have to identify nodes and systems that are critical to mission assurance. We’ve got to carefully prioritize what assets, what data, which data path, we will protect in extremis.
GENERAL WILLIAM L. SHELTON, COMMANDER OF THE AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND, SPEAKING DURING THE 11TH ANNUAL AIR FORCE IT DAY AT TYSON’S CORNER, VIRGINIA, OCTOBER 11, 2012
On May 18, 2012, the federal government was back in New Orleans, ignoring the certainties of nature and hoping to prepare city, state, and local officials for the enduring calamity that trumps all others: a terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction. The FBI was sponsoring a daylong tabletop exercise starring a ship weighted with 12,000 tons of ammonium nitrate (and two terrorist crew members) belatedly discovered to be on watch lists, all bound for the Big Easy.1
The FBI is assigned responsibility to deal with managing such crises—“crisis management” being a term with a very specific meaning beyond the colloquial in order to distinguish it from the equally precisely defined “consequence management”: the FBI, as the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, is in charge of preventing terrorist attacks, while the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA—and local authorities—are left with cleaning up afterward.2 More specifically, if there is any suspected domestic violation of any WMD statute, it is the FBI’s domain.3
The FBI’s preeminence in domestic counterterrorism goes back to a classified Reagan directive, Managing Terrorist Incidents, in 1982,4 reaffirmed by Clinton, Bush, and Obama. The FBI is delegated “a host of specialized technical resources so that it can investigate, contain and minimize any weapon of mass destruction,” according to a Joint Chiefs of Staff directive.5
The New Orleans exercise writers did what exercise writers do—they piled it on: someone suspicious photographing a chemical plant, multiple shootings at sensitive facilities, a chemical leak, hostage-taking, even the release of nuclear radiation.6 The effect was strikingly similar to a mind-numbing action movie with too many car chases, shootings, and subplots—a heart-pumping ride that compensated for a weak story line. But the exercise was not without objective—it was so evident as to be explicit: overwhelm New Orleans’s responders and investigators, thus teaching them how to prepare for the ultimate disaster, which meant asking for federal assistance. The scenario was a trap that no locality could escape. Indeed, state and local governments and private-sector businesses thus indoctrinated as to the continuance and gravity of WMD could only win by recognizing the need for an early surrender—the only outcome approved by those administering the hundreds of other traveling road shows customized for each community.
One might think that the storm-primed first responders in Louisiana would balk at participating, not predisposed to waste their time in some speculative exercise involving terrorism and weapons of mass destruction when hurricane season was just around the corner. An immediate incentive for participation, though, was that New Orleans was hosting the 2013 Super Bowl—one of those national security special events that government takes to be the magnet for the worst of all possibilities. Such occasions always bring feds swarming, and there is the promise of grants and financial support from Big Daddy, financial assistance elevated beyond partisan sniping and made more politically immune because it goes under the subject heading of national defense. Plus all the other states and local communities were participating in WMD exercises, equally shepherded by the special call. Thus New Orleans EMS Deputy Chief Ken Bouvier obediently yammered to local TV that the big lesson from Katrina was to “know how to work within a unified command,” rationalizing federal rules, preparedness, and a WMD threat.7
In East Lansing, Michigan, two months later, the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction directorate set up another PowerPoint sensation, another local show, this time positing an attack on food and water supplies. The scenario writers piled on signs of suspicious activities at food processing plants, hardware stores, pharmacies, and pool supply businesses, even throwing in newfangled cyberattacks on digital control systems to concoct terrorist—or even foreign government—capability and intent to contaminate the American lifeblood. “At the end of the day, any response to a situation regarding the safety of our food supply will require a multiagency response,” said Jeff Muller, assistant section chief for countermeasures in the WMD Directorate.8 That was exactly the learning objective intended: a multiagency response means the deferential involvement and surrender to the federal government. So it would be in exercise after exercise.
As part of its post-9/11 reorganization to focus more on proactive counterterrorism, the FBI established the WMD Directorate in July 2006.9 The directorate, the bureau says, created “a unique combination of law enforcement authorities, intelligence analysis capabilities, and technical subject matter expertise that exists nowhere else in the US government.”10 Once intelligence information comes in indicating a WMD connection to any potential domestic goings-on, or if local authorities suspect something related to hazardous materials and a crime, national protocols are for the closest FBI office to take charge of the event (no longer called a PDD-39 event but almost identical in its unfolding). Since April 2008, all fifty-six of the bureau’s field divisions have assigned a full-time WMD coordinator; and the larger offices all also have emergency response teams, special agent bomb technicians, and hazardous materials response teams.11 If a potential terrorism nexus involving weapons of mass destruction is determined to have any validity, the local FBI WMD coordinator then calls on the Weapons of Mass Destruction Operations Unit in Washington for reinforcements.12 “If we get something unusual on the radar, we immediately jump on it to determine whether it’s WMD and possibly linked to terrorism,” says Special Agent Michael F. Varacalli, former chief of the unit.13
The unit is responsible for convening all the relevant agencies to oversee every aspect of any WMD-related criminal investigation. Inside the FBI, there are more than a dozen biological, chemical, radiological, and maritime technical teams to assist with credibility and safety assessments, some under the WMD Directorate, some under other FBI components.14 The FBI national-level units include:
Once the existence of a WMD is affirmed by scientific verification or intelligence, the attorney general authorizes the activation and movement of the multiagency Domestic Emergency Support Team (DEST) to support the FBI.16 The DEST, today organized by the FEMA administrator, is the consequence management side of the federal response.17 The FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, an independent organization that is akin to military special operations forces, is the gateway to the black side. CIRG specializes in crisis management18 (or incident management, as it is sometimes called)—that is, stopping a terrorist attack. CIRG also conducts what the FBI euphemistically calls tactical operations, in essence military operations performed by the FBI, a civilian organization, on American soil.19 According to the FBI, the Tactical Support Branch of CIRG “provides the FBI with a nationwide, three-tiered tactical resolution capability that upon proper authorization can be activated within four hours of notification to address a full spectrum of terrorist or criminal matters.”20 Four 150-man rapid-deployment tactical support teams are located in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Washington, DC, for Tiers 3 and 2. For Tier 1, the most exceptional missions, the National Assets Response Unit calls upon the fully militarized FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT), hardly only a hostage rescue team,21 and/or the defense department’s Joint Special Operations Task Force; both are part of the national mission forces. If WMD and terrorism are actually involved, it is literally and officially deemed “extraordinary” and a green light snaps on, allowing federal responders to do anything to prevent use: spare no resources, take initiative if laws or the Constitution are in the way, and shoot to kill.
Outside the FBI, the network of those who can hypothetically join in the DEST is gigantic: more than 1,000 local bomb squads, SWAT teams, fire departments, EMS and hazardous material (HAZMAT) response units, half of them specially trained for various types of WMD, all of them FBI exercise partners and affiliates.22 In federal departments and agencies outside the FBI, there are more than fifty specialized biological, chemical, radiological, nuclear, and high explosives teams—the most famous being the NEST of the national laboratories under the Department of Energy. Each federal team has separate response protocols and capabilities, depending on the location, the timing, the toxin, and the tier of the crisis.23 Then there are a host of military capabilities, from the lowliest explosive ordnance disposal units at the garrison level—many of whom are also specially trained to deal with WMD and improvised devices—to fifty-six National Guard WMD civil support teams, at least one in each state that can act as federal first responders,24 a Defense CBRNE Task Force, the Joint Task Force Civil Support, and the Joint Task Force Elimination, an accumulating multitude stuck somewhere in limbo between crisis and consequence management. And at the tippy-top are those Tier 1 national mission forces.
Tens of thousands of WMD first responders across the nation are assigned the incredible domestic mission, aided by multibillion-dollar detection systems and the highest intelligence and physical security priorities. The numbers are more a reflection of the absolute deference paid to biological and nuclear consequences than to the likelihood that some terrorist incident might occur in real life. In a way, that’s why there’s so much practicing. FBI data shows that from fiscal year 2005—the year the WMD Directorate was established—until fiscal year 2009, at least 936 WMD exercises were held around the country.25 In the first year of its existence, the directorate hosted and participated in 16 exercises and provided instruction to 1,200 participants. Just two years later, that number had jumped to 90 FBI-hosted exercises and training for almost 7,000 people in law enforcement and private industry.26
When the FBI isn’t indoctrinating and training its army of WMD warriors, it is also more tangibly snooping around America for signs of vulnerabilities of WMD stocks and ingredients. Though the FBI has been responsible for familiarity with the vulnerability of the US critical infrastructure since before 9/11,27 in September 2008, headquarters began requiring that each field division conduct a “WMD domain assessment” to identify and prioritize the most important of all threats and vulnerabilities in their districts,28 as one national laboratory report says, looking at the vulnerability of “sensitive and high value targets” that terrorists might attack or infiltrate.29 The local FBI offices collect and analyze information regarding “the most pressing WMD threats and vulnerabilities,” preparing a list of the “top 10” and a WMD vulnerability assessment used for outreach and training of local WMD soldiers and private-sector draftees.30
A field division’s WMD domain can include thousands of different “WMD domain entities,” defined as government and private-sector interests such as transportation hubs, nuclear power plants, laboratories, hospitals, and manufacturing firms. And according to an FBI document, the WMD domain entities also include parks, houses of worship, shopping malls, beauty salons, farms, and even “residents.”31 The WMD license is virtually unlimited.
Only since President Clinton’s PDD-39 have high-yield explosives—what we used to call conventional weapons—been included in the official definition of weapons of mass destruction, and only since 9/11 has any type of weapon “capable of killing a lot of people and/or causing a high-order magnitude of destruction” been included.32 And that doesn’t just mean specifically crafted weapons, since airliners and “disease organisms” and other “nonweapons” have been added to the mix as “weapons of mass effect.”33 (During the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in 2008—a national security special event—the FBI even threw Molotov cocktails in there as well, citing eleven arrests “with respect to WMD,” all involving soda bottles filled with gasoline.34) And not only that: the National Military Strategy statement produced after 9/11 uses the term “WMD” to describe what it calls “asymmetrical weapons,” those that “may rely more on disruptive impact than destructive kinetic effects. For example, negative psychological effects on people may be more severe than the numbers of lethal destruction or the degree of economic damage.”35 And as one FBI document says: “Note that the [legal] definitions include words such as ‘designed’ and ‘intended,’ indicating that an attack does not need to be carried out for a successful prosecution,”36 nor as a predicate for wide-ranging investigations. Thus WMD is everything, anything, and always.
What results is an enormous dragnet. The FBI’s “countermeasures” program, begun in 2007, follows what the bureau calls a “threat mitigation strategy” to educate the agricultural, biological, chemical, nuclear, and related academic and industrial sectors to detect terrorism.37 FBI WMD coordinators work with biological, chemical, and nuclear specialists from state and local government—and the private sector—to keep abreast of scientific and technical developments that terrorists might exploit.38 The FBI’s agroterrorism partnership program, its biosecurity program, its synthetic biology tripwire program, and its joint “Crim-Epi” (criminal-epidemiological) initiative open doors to the private sector and justify an enormously elastic predicate for reporting, intelligence collection, and investigation.39 FBI training and outreach materials promote collaboration of law enforcement and public health, encourage businesses to report suspicious customers and purchase inquiries, and seek to instill alertness (i.e., sow suspicion) amongst experts to prevent “exploitation,” reaching far into the academic community and private entities in the name of WMD.40 The bureau even manages to have the authority to perform background and database checks on private individuals being considered for access to a select group of biological agents and toxins.41
“The threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is the FBI’s most pressing concern,” outgoing WMD Directorate head Vahid Majidi told Congress in October 2011. “Dozens” of international and domestic terrorist organizations have announced their intention to use WMD, he said, citing an “increased threat,” boasting that since the establishment of the directorate in 2006, the FBI had successfully managed “hundreds of cases involving biological substances and suspicious powders”—successfully managing to suggest cases that in reality number only a handful since 2006, with an even smaller number involving international terrorism.42
Even after the death of Osama bin Laden and a decade of security efforts at home, WMD is portrayed by government officials, members of Congress, the newspapers, the pundits, and the experts not only as real, but as ever growing. WMD is a magic wand, an ever-present license. In fact, Majidi glossed over the reality that the majority of the directorate’s investigative workload is responding to hoaxes. To keep busy, moreover, the bureau conducts investigations of “criminals” involved in “materials and knowledge related to WMD”—particularly in the biotechnology field—and “the attempted or actual transfer of materials, knowledge, and technology needed to create a WMD,” even if no connection to weapons of mass destruction is present. The FBI is particularly concerned with the insider threat in US biological and medical laboratories, Majidi said, “based on several recent incidents involving the illicit acquisition of bacterial and viral cultures.”43 If anything, the hundreds of cases Majidi refers to represent a monumental improvement, since in just four months after the anthrax letter mailings in October 2001, the FBI says, it responded to over 8,000 “reports” of the use or threatened use of anthrax or other hazardous materials, most of them also hoaxes and bogus copycats.44 Indeed, in New Orleans, FBI agents chatted with the news media about the fabulous bananas Foster they’d had at their real tabletop in the French Quarter the night before and where to get a good cigar at the end of their WMD war game. “While Perren would not give specifics to how tripwires would preemptively recognize a WMD maritime related threat,” one news blogger posted, “… he did say he enjoyed Emeril’s last night.”45
None of this is meant to suggest anything nefarious on the part of the FBI; I’m sure the G-men and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate believe that WMD is indeed the ultimate threat and want nothing more than to prevent an attack. So they cycle through every possibility and method, try and retry every technique, and eye every location to keep one step ahead; they adapt for greater and greater vigilance and unification of the nation, working their exercises and outreach and countermeasures to propagate everyone’s part. The FBI not only wants to believe that its work “deters” and “prevents” but also that following the latest methods of counterterrorism, intelligence, and law enforcement—introducing everyone to everyone else, standardizing communications, screening out bad elements and suspicious persons, enlisting the private sector in identifying critical infrastructure and initiating protection, perfecting the procedures and protocols of responding to an alert—not only staves off a possible WMD attack but also forestalls a potentially lawless descent. If everyone can be brought together in harmony, a certain societal unity might help to defeat terrorism. And if not…
What if? What if an attack—a real, large-scale society-changing biological or nuclear attack—were actually detected beforehand? All of the preparations, whether they be the passive efforts of BioWatch and DNDO or the proactive FBI measures, certainly suggest that this possibility is taken seriously and prepared for. But where in all of this is the real capability to stop a terrorist attack in its tracks?